You Must Change Your Life (30 page)

But maybe there was still hope for her in death, Rilke wrote. Whereas male artists were free to give creative births whenever they pleased, women's bodies condemned them to the physical realm. Rilke begged Becker, now freed of her body, to complete her transformation, to stop haunting the living and reject life at last: “Do not return. If you can bear it, stay / dead with the dead . . .”

Rilke immediately mailed his publisher the manuscript, which he dedicated to Clara Westhoff. Since it was not quite the length of a book, they decided he would write a second requiem and publish them together in a single volume. Rilke chose for his other subject a young poet by the name of Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth. Rilke had never met the man personally, but he was known in Worpswede for having killed himself at just nineteen years old. His potential cut short, he was another artistic amputee and a kind of spiritual twin to Becker

Rilke imagined in the poem what might have kept Kalckreuth alive. If only the boy had lived long enough to see the kind of things Rilke had seen in the past few years with Rodin. If only he had witnessed the joys of labor and a workplace, “where men were hammering and day achieving / simple reality . . .” He might have then understood the lesson Rilke learned in Paris: that language is not a tool to “tell us where it hurts,” but to build something out of the pain.

Having exorcised Becker from his mind, Rilke was able to turn back to the deadline at hand, the final draft of
New Poems
. Rilke worked so intently during these first months at the Hôtel Biron that it's no surprise Cocteau wasn't aware of him. The only person Rilke saw was Rodin, who sometimes dropped by to offer a word of encouragement. Embrace your solitude, he would say, it is the ultimate happiness. Once he told Rilke that the way the poet painted the truth with words made all other writers seem mundane to him by comparison.

Shortly after he completed the “Requiem,” Rilke finished the
New
Poems
. The collection would not be the defining achievement of his career, but it would veer him permanently from his old course and into a new direction. As the title declares, the book was unlike anything Rilke had written before. In spare, unsentimental prose he chiseled out portraits of odd, nonhuman subjects, like worms, wounds and animals. Like Cubism, Rilke's
New Poems
collapsed figure and ground and examined objects from multiple vantage points.

In the
New Poems
, or “thing poems,” as he called them, people disappeared almost entirely. Even the things in question often recede into the background or appear only as negative space. He shades in surroundings to form outlines that bring the things into focus. A poem ostensibly about a swan, then, is also about the water on which it rests, as much as it is about dying: “to let go, no longer feel / the solid ground we stand on every day.”

The book divided Rilke's critics. Some of his early German supporters felt betrayed by his break with romantic lyricism. Those in Vienna tended to embrace the book's
fin-de-siècle
-style emotional detachment. While some argued over whether to categorize the
New Poems
' author as a German, Austrian or Bohemian poet, Rilke snubbed them all with a dedication to a Frenchman:
À mon grand Ami Auguste Rodin
.

When his publisher suggested that he at least translate the dedication into German to match the rest of the book, Rilke insisted it remain in Rodin's native French. He had heard his master's words—
travailler, toujours travailler
—and it had resulted in probably the most productive period of his career to date. In spite of whatever differences were beginning to arise between them, Rilke would always have Rodin to thank for that.

More than that, Rodin's example had given him a blueprint for a new way to write. “Prose wants to be built like a cathedral; there one is truly without name, without ambition, without help: among scaffoldings, with only one's conscience,” Rilke wrote in a letter to Rodin over New Year's, soon after the book's publication. “I would have to explain myself at length to anyone else. But you, my dear and only friend, you will know what that means.”

     

RILKE HAD HARDLY SAVORED
the accomplishment of the
New Poems
before diving back to work in the winter of 1909. He vowed to push himself to the edges of the creative fever that had begun with the
Requiem
, telling his publisher in January that he would commit himself to nothing but
Malte
from that day forward. He didn't care that that meant locking himself in his room at the Hôtel Biron, and virtually taking meals “through a little sliding window, like a prisoner,” he wrote. He would not receive visitors and would not take vacations until he finished the book that summer.

But no sooner had he made this promise than he found himself compelled to break it. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Clara Westhoff and his Italian love interest, Mimi Romanelli—the three most important women in Rilke's life then—all happened to be planning trips to Paris that May.

A meeting between Romanelli and Westhoff went apparently without incident, although Rilke did not write much about the visit, perhaps because the arrival of Andreas-Salomé would, as usual, eclipse all else. He was eager to facilitate an introduction that would impress her, for once, rather than the other way around. When she came to see him at the Hôtel Biron, he brought her down the hall to meet Rodin. They spent an afternoon in the sculptor's garden-side suite, where the French doors were swung open onto the lawn of wild springtime blooms.

Rodin told Andreas-Salomé how he had been so preoccupied with work lately that he sometimes found himself confusing his statues for real people. The distinction between fantasy and reality had caused him trouble for as long as he could remember. He said that because he “ ‘had not accomplished his childhood,' ” and had instead avoided it, he had started to “put things of fiction in its place.”

Rilke also took Andreas-Salomé to visit Westhoff and to see Rodin's studio in Meudon. After she returned home to Germany she wrote Rilke to tell him how meaningful the trip had been for her. She
said that if she could gaze at any one object for a length of time it would be Rodin's
Balzac
, standing just as it was that day in Meudon, in a patch of clovers. She also reiterated her heartfelt approval of Westhoff: “I feel more affection for her than she can possibly know.”

When Rilke's guests departed he might have been ready to return to work, but he felt a familiar sickness creeping into his body. By then he was so accustomed to illness that “even now my best moments are those of a convalescent,” he wrote that summer. But this felt worse than the usual flus. The muscles in his forehead tensed up, spreading down to his cheeks and then his tongue, throat and esophagus.

In September, he traveled to the Black Forest to purify himself in the mineral springs and soak up pine-needle “air-baths.” When that didn't work he went to Provence, where he tried to soothe himself with pastoral visions of sheep grazing in fields of thyme. He had no name for this mysterious ailment, but it may as well have been Malte. The character had been growing inside Rilke like a tumor for seven years. Other projects had come and gone, yet this shadowy figure had overpowered them all, trailing Rilke across the Continent on scraps of paper, in letters and ripped-out diary pages. But now this unresolved poet stood firmly in Rilke's path, demanding to be made real. The only way to move past Malte was to go directly through him.

That fall, Rilke finally shut himself up in his drafty room at the Hôtel Biron, seeing almost no one, as planned. He even missed the inauguration of Rodin's marble monument to Victor Hugo at the Palais Royal in September. When Count Kessler stopped by to see him the following month he found the poet shivering and sick, “as if spider webs covered him.” Rilke now spent all his time cobbling together the scraps of ideas he'd accumulated for the new book, trying to assemble them into a coherent manuscript.

With the
New Poems
he felt he had a well-defined task, one “which I answered clearly and surely with pure achievement.”
Malte
, on the other hand, was a more difficult, disorderly undertaking. He was locked in a duel with his doppelgänger, and so far Malte was winning. His fictional creation was proving “infinitely stronger” than Rilke was. To
get inside his opponent's head, Rilke had to reacquaint himself with the madness that had authored his “Requiem.” He had to live through Malte's sickness and, if it came to it, die his death so that he could truly understand him.

The task before him looked so insurmountable that the only thought that gave Rilke any comfort was the possibility of quitting writing altogether. It was the first time Rilke seriously doubted his ability to go on. But right now he could hardly find the strength to move, much less to work. When his writing went well, his mind moved so fast his pen could hardly keep up. But in times like this, entire days could pass without putting down a single word.

Rilke and “Poor Malte,” as he often called him, had reached a stalemate. Unsure of his fictional poet's fate, Rilke considered two possible endings, both of which he considered tragic: kill Malte off, or convert him to Christianity. He decided against the first option and wrote an ending where Malte considers religious salvation through a meeting with Tolstoy, who, as Rilke knew from his own unpleasant encounter with the author a decade earlier, became deeply devout at the end of his life.

Enacting a kind of revenge fantasy against his old hero, Rilke's protagonist meets Tolstoy and finds that the author's religiosity seems to be the symptom of his failure as an artist. Unable to invent his own god, Tolstoy had had to settle for the surrogate god of Christianity. As Rilke once said, “Religion is the art of the non-artistic.”

But after tinkering with several versions of this ending, Rilke ultimately discarded it, moving on to a possibility inspired by another author. Rilke had not been reading much in those days but a friend had recently given him a copy of André Gide's latest book,
Strait is the Gate
, and Rilke couldn't put it down. The fable about the failings of love and faith led the poet to conclude that Gide was unlike any other Frenchman. He wrote with originality and precision about “the very great task of love, which none of us has been able to accomplish.”

Rilke raced through Gide's other books, coming at last upon his short story “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Gide had rewritten
the ending of the Bible parable so that the younger boy returns home to his father not out of repentance or obligation, but because he had exhausted his curiosity. “I was not seeking happiness,” Gide's prodigal tells his mother.

“What were you seeking?” she asks.

“I was seeking . . . who I was.”

That Gide's story picks up almost exactly where the Bible parable left off gave Rilke the idea to write his own ending to the tale. But before he could sit down to do it, the more pressing question arose of
where
he could do it.

THE TENANTS OF THE
Hôtel Biron had largely ignored the “For Sale” sign that had been posted on their door since the summer, but in December, the owners of the building announced plans for a sale. Now eviction appeared imminent.

Rilke scanned his address book for names of patrons who might offer him money, or perhaps a guesthouse by the sea. But he did not have to look long before a guardian angel unexpectedly arrived that month.

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis was one of the highest-ranking noblewomen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She hardly needed to apologize for writing Rilke a letter out of the blue, but she did, explaining that she was in town for just a few days and she admired his work so much that she hoped he might meet her for tea on Monday at five o'clock. Should he accept, they would also be joined by her friend, the countess-poet Anna de Noailles.

Not one to turn down a princess, Rilke needed no persuading. He also already knew Noailles's work, and had praised it in an essay two years earlier. Rilke wrote back that day expressing regret that he could not have responded even sooner. He felt the desire to meet Thurn und Taxis “imperiously and urgently.”

When Noailles caught sight of Rilke entering the Hôtel Liverpool the following week, she called out across the room, “Herr Rilke, how do you feel about love and how do you feel about death?” This greeting
must have rattled the poet, who did not take such topics lightly. Nor did he respond well to confrontations or outbursts of any kind. Still, he must have come up with a response that satisfied her, because their meeting went on for two hours.

Rilke was a natural when it came to charming aristocratic women—it helped that he had grown up watching his mother pretend to be one. Over the years he developed an extreme sensitivity to etiquette, or what Andreas-Salomé once referred to as his “delicate lordliness.” As a boy he acted like a little gentleman, always minding his manners and using words he didn't understand. To this day, he rarely addressed friends with the familiar
du
pronoun and he never, under any circumstance, swore.

The princess was impressed by her first conversation with the poet. He was exceptionally gentle and his soft-spoken nature made him seem quite distinguished. Their encounter ultimately resulted in the longest, most sustaining patronage of Rilke's life. Rather than merely accepting his benefactors' money and invitations with gratitude, Rilke tended to cultivate genuine emotional bonds with them, and with the princess in particular.

These relationships did not always appear so sincere to outsiders, however. Rilke's castle-hopping lifestyle naturally provoked irritation and envy among many of his peers. “Those Rilke-hags surely must have been awful, and I'm not making an exception for the princesses and countesses with whom the Austrian snob maintained a correspondence,” complained the German writer Thomas Mann.